There is an ongoing and urgent need to reduce consumption of electricity, gas and water both for environmental and cost reasons.
A large proportion of the electrical energy, gas and water supplied by utilities suppliers is wasted as a result of inefficiencies such as use of electrical appliances that have poor efficiency or for behavioural reasons such as appliances that are left switched on and so consume electricity even when not in use, or consumption of water than is actually needed. This leads to wastage and increased utilities costs. Moreover, with respect to electricity, electrical energy use in buildings accounts for a very large proportion of all carbon emissions. Demand for utilities can vary dramatically between identical buildings with the same number of occupants, and this suggests that reducing waste through behavioural efficiency is essential. Therefore, efforts are required to change the patterns of utilities use by consumers.
The utilities suppliers recognise three major obstacles to progress in this objective: a shortage of sources of competitive advantage, a lack of detailed understanding of their customers, and a lack of “touch points”, i.e. ways of interacting with the customers. Opportunities for differentiation revolve mainly around price and “green” issues, i.e. reduction of environmental impact. The utilities suppliers have very little information about their customers' behaviour since electricity, gas and water meters collect whole house data continuously and are read infrequently.
Meters to measure total consumption of utilities of a household are commonplace for each of gas, electricity and water, however this total is not useful in identifying areas in which efficiencies may be possible (for brevity, we refer herein to a “household”, however it will be appreciated that the present invention is not limited to a domestic house but may be applied to any domestic, workplace or other setting that receives its own discrete utilities supplies, in particular mains electricity supply from an electricity grid; water supply; and/or gas supply.).
Detailed information on utility consumption may be provided by a system comprising a measuring device which may be a standard utility meter, a Smart meter, or an sensor additional to the meter or a datalogger attached to the meter (for example to read pulse output counts).
These systems contain a pathway for returning data to a utility supplier or a utility service provider, such as a return path as in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) or automatic meter reading (AMR) systems. Alternatively, upload of data may be via the internet through a gateway within the household, and/or via a display or device that logs data and can upload data from time to time by wired or wireless communication means.
Data return may be under the utility provider's control and/or under the consumer's control.
For example, a smart energy kit is available from Onzo Limited in which electricity consumption data measured by an electricity sensor connectable to a conventional electricity meter is wirelessly transmitted to a user display that displays data such as current power consumption, daily total energy consumption, comparison to previous weeks, target energy consumption, cost of electricity consumed and alerts when usage is high and/or at times when national grid demand is high. This data may be uploaded via the internet to a server for analysis of utility consumption.
While metering of this type provide a simple and effective way of communicating detailed information on utility consumption, the information that such meters generate is based only on the directly measured electricity consumption data.
In order to develop a more detailed understanding of utility consumption within a household, household occupants may also be requested to answer a questionnaire including questions such as the household location, household size, number of occupants, appliances within the household, etc., although answering such a questionnaire to the level of detail required to provide improved utility consumption data can be very time consuming and inconvenient. Moreover, the answers given to such questions may change over time.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a user-friendly means of generating detailed and accurate information on utility consumption.